Everyone Is Tired
Your stress isn’t unique. Neither are your fears, struggles and the anger that flares up when you get stepped on.
Hey, I’m touchy too.
I snap often enough to make me want to apologise profusely for being vicious to people just because they crossed one of my many invisible lines.
Because, you see, they can’t see the lines. They don’t know my rules and thresholds. They’re not living my life.
So when I take out my frustrations on the innocent and the uninvolved or expect that they should know how I woke up, it’s inconsiderate and I have no excuse.
I know the things you’re going through matter and I will never belittle them, but empathy requires that you don’t belittle mine or anyone else’s either. It’s just the right thing to do.
Look, if you haven’t noticed, the long-running war between good and evil translates into a very familiar conflict between empathy and selfishness.
It’s a bitter fight playing out in all of us and we pick a side by the way we treat each other every day.
Not by giving long speeches about how much we care about humanity, tweeting our fury or donating a few boxes of noodles to orphans on our annual day of generosity.
We can’t make up for being self-centered pieces of shit with random acts of Instagrammable kindness.
It can never balance out.
That’s just us trying to sleep well at night, but that won’t happen because we’re our own nightmares.
We became monsters when we forgot how to be consistently decent to each other.
And the saddest part is, it’s not even that hard.
You already know.